Sabrina & Corina: Stories

Corina, the narrator of this story, tells this story from her past. She recalls the day that her grandmother called her while she was working at the Macy’s makeup counter. Her grandmother told her that Sabrina, her cousin and purported best friend, had been strangled and killed.

Corina drives to her grandmother’s house after her shift is done. She walks past children playing in the front yard, and her father and uncles lounging listlessly in the living room. None of the men greet her. She finds the women gathered in the kitchen. Her grandmother is tending three pots full of the food items that are habitually prepared during moments like this: green chili, pinto beans, and menudo: “Deaths, weddings, birthdays—the menu was always the same,” Corina says (26).

Some cousins sit at the kitchen table. They pass around pictures of Sabrina, covetously remembering her beauty. Corina’s grandmother tells her that she is the one who knew Sabrina best. Corina, who hadn’t seen Sabrina in months, does not correct her.

Corina recounts a time when she was 11 and Sabrina was 12. They were on the roof of their grandmother’s house. Sabrina pressed Corina to recount her first memory. Corina remembers a time when their mothers took them on a trip to a mountain lake. She remembers being stung by a bee: “You’re such a copycat, Corina. That was me. I was the one who got stung,” Sabrina said (28). Corina remembers that this statement stung her deeply.

The women squabble over whether Sabrina should have a closed or open casket. Corina’s grandmother will not abide the idea of a closed casket: “It’s so phony, disrespectful. With no body to view, it’s like they never were on this earth to begin with,” she says (29). Corina’s mother reminds her that Carlos Ramirez, the mortician, made Auntie Celia, who died in her sleep, look like “a pickled pig’s ear” (29). However, Corina’s grandmother insists that there are all kinds of makeup and creams that he can use now to get Sabrina’s body looking presentable. She then turns to Corina and announces that she is perfectly capable of doing Sabrina’s makeup.

Corina has a flashback to the quinceañera that the family hosted last year—and the way that her wrists ached after she completed the makeup and hair of her 11 cousins. She privately reflects on how her family encouraged her to go into cosmetology—“partly because [she] was good at it and partly, [she] suspected, because [her] family loved free services and products” (29). Corina tries to refuse what her grandmother is asking her to do, but she reads the expression on her grandmother’s face and resigns herself to the reality that there will be no refusal.

Corina recalls that Sabrina loved their grandmother’s home. She remembers a time that she and Sabrina were in her grandmother’s bathroom, which had a full-length mirror on every wall. Corina writes, “My grandmother believed every woman needed to know how she looked from any angle. It was important, she said, to know how the rest of the world viewed us” (30). Sabrina had convinced Corina to stand on the bathroom’s pink countertop, facing her: “All around we were reflected in the four mirrors endlessly, like one tangled spider of a girl,” Corina recalls (30). Sabrina was wearing heart-shaped sunglasses that she stole from the corner store. They covered her most noticeable figure: blue, large eyes that she got from her White father, who was not in her life.

Later, Corina arrives at Ramirez Mortuary. She finds it mostly the same as it has always appeared over the years. She has brought a duffel bag of Sabrina’s things: “a modest red dress, a quartz rosary, silk flowers for her hair, an old photograph” (32). As Carlos leads her down the hallway, he tells her that she doesn’t have to do Sabrina’s makeup if she doesn’t want to—but that if she does, she has two hours before the wake begins. He also tells her that no one can know that he is allowing her to prepare Sabrina’s body. He also offers her his condolences: “She was a beautiful girl. Really, she was,” he says (33).

Corina recalls that she and Sabrina were always together during high school: “She was vivid and felt everything deeply, from heartbreak to the drunken nights we stayed up until 4:00 A.M., mapping out our tiny lives with enormity only Sabrina could imagine” (33). She remembers that Sabrina dropped out of school in eleventh grade and began waiting tables at a downtown sports bar. Corina remembers the hungry way that the male diners’ eyes followed Sabrina around the restaurant.

After Corina graduated from high school, her father volunteered to pay for her to go to cosmetology school. He wanted her to avoid the lifestyle that Sabrina had already slipped into—although Sabrina wasn’t the only troubled one in their community. While Corina completed her cosmetology studies, Sabrina continued to work in bars and sleep with many men, whose vacant expressions reminded Corina of the photographs of Sabrina’s absent father. Sabrina would occasionally visit Corina at school, where Corina would apply concealer to Sabrina’s neck to cover up bruised hickeys before Sabrina had to go to work.

Corina also remembers going to a bar with Sabrina one night. Men, vying to take Sabrina home that night, congregated around her as she got drunk and soaked up the attention. Corina was disgusted by this sight. After wrestling her away from the men, who quickly turned their attention to another drunk woman at the bar, Corina asked Sabrina, “Don’t you care how people look at you?” (36): “They look at us the same way, Corina […] They look at us like we’re nothing,” came Sabrina’s reply (36).

Back in the funeral home, Corina regards Sabrina’s body as it lies on a chrome table: “These pretty girls […] they get themselves into such ugly situations,” Carlos laments (37). With slightly shaking hands, she tells Carlos that she can complete the job. Carlos gives her the reference photograph that he has used to model her eyes. It’s a photograph from when Sabrina was 21 or 22.

By the time Sabrina and Corina reached their mid-twenties, their friendship had basically disintegrated. Corina recalls that Sabrina rarely showed up at family dinners by that time—but when she did, “she was puffy-eyed and sallow-skinned, her slinky tops always falling off her shoulders” (39). Corina also recalls a time from that period in which Sabrina unexpectedly showed up at Macy’s. She was wearing a short denim skirt and a sloppy purse filled with garbage: “crumpled tissues, capless pens, two loose dollars” (40). She asked Corina to help her celebrate her birthday, which was the next day. Corina agreed.

Corina spent the next day being haunted by her friend’s haggard appearance. However, she decorated her apartment, baked a cake, and put together a gift bag full of makeup items. Then she fell asleep waiting for Sabrina, who did not arrive until midnight. Sabrina was clearly drunk. She tells Corina that she could not stop thinking about one of the stories that their grandmother would tell her when they were young. In it, a young and beautiful girl is lured into disobeying her family to go to a dance with a handsome White stranger. This stranger, a good dancer, twirls the girl around the dance floor for hours. Suddenly, the girl notices that people are gawking at her. All the places where the man has touched her are burnt, and she screams when she discovers his cloven hooves. Sabrina laughed, remembering the story with fondness. However, Corina insisted that the story was horrible. The girls then fought about Sabrina’s late arrival, and Sabrina threw Corina’s presents in the garbage. After Sabrina insinuates that Corina is a mouse who has always simply followed her around, Corina told her that she did not envy Sabrina’s pathetic life. Sabrina then charged out into the snowy night, alone.

At the funeral, Sabrina’s casket is open. Classical music plays on the speakers, and flower arrangements as well as an ivory curtain adorn the area around the casket. When it’s Corina’s turn to peer into the casket, she finds that someone has smeared lipstick on Sabrina’s forehead while kissing her, and that Sabrina’s cheek is colder than she expected. Corina’s grandmother finds her in this moment. She tells Corina that everyone is saying that she has done a marvelous job with Sabrina’s makeup, and that Sabrina looks beautiful. Corina thinks about how Sabrina’s story will simply become another cautionary tale told by her grandmother:

I thought of all the women my family had lost, the horrible things they’d witnessed, the acts they simply endured. Sabrina had become another face in a line of tragedies that stretched back generations […] The stories always ended the same, only different girls died, and I didn’t want to hear them anymore (44).

Corina remembers the last time she saw Sabrina alive. It was five months ago, at a party on Colfax Avenue, “in one of those stone mansions built by silver barons and their doe-eyed wives” (44). There, Sabrina told her that she was moving to California with a man. The two women had not seen each other since Sabrina’s birthday, but Sabrina tells Corina that she must come visit her once she’s settled. Corina remembers telling her that maybe she would. As a black SUV pulled up, Sabrina ran towards it while calling out to Corina, asking her what her first memory in the entire world was. Corina reminds her of the story of the bee sting, which Sabrina has claimed happened to her: “It doesn’t matter […] you can have that memory if you want,” Sabrina said (45). Sabrina then climbed into the SUV, and Corina remembers: “The road shimmered with black ice. All I could see was Sabrina’s long hair coiling around her neck, pale as the moon” (46).